Saturday TV: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Story

I was never a big fan of Lynyrd Skynyrd — too many nights of people yelling “Freebird”; too many oversized Confederate Flags, the single line “Watergate doesn’t bother me” in “Sweet Home Alabama.”

But the band did provide me with one unforgettable rock star moment, when I was interviewing Ronnie VanZant backstage after a show in college and he leaned back and said “I can do anything I want” and promptly fell over.

A better back story is found in the documentary “If I Leave Here Tomorrow: A Film about Lynyrd Skynyrd” (Showtime, 9 p.m.) that has a lot of footage of early high school days in Jacksonville, Fla., and just as much scouring the woods where their plane went down in 1977, killing half the band, still finding parts of the fuselage as they do.

One still doesn’t expect new offerings from the Children’s Television Workshop to end up on the network of “Westworld” and “The Deuce,” but the “Sesame Street” relations with HBO has brought a new animated children’s show, “Esme & Roy” (HBO, 9:30 a.m.) about a girl and her monster.